In press:  Journal of Popular Culture
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Anne Bower

Our Sisters' Recipes: Exploring "Community" in a Community Cookbook

	
	Since fund-raising cookbooks (also known as regional, charitable,
and community cookbooks) seem to proliferate like mushrooms in autumn
forests, we often take them for granted.  Yet these simple books are
distinctively American cultural artifacts, capabl e of telling us much
about their authors and their communities.  The charitable cookbook
originated during the Civil War, as northern women developed money-raising
strategies to support the Sanitary Commission of the Union Army.  Profits
from the sale of quilts and other handiwork, food items, and communally
authored cookbooks paid for bandages, medicines, doctors, and nurses. 
After the Civil War, other benevolent organizations, especially churches
and synagogues, adopted the use of fund-raising cookbook s. Until very
recently, all such recipe collections have been produced by women. 
Women's stated motivation for such work was raising money for causes in
which they believed.  However, as has been documented, women also sought
personal development, frie ndship, cultural stimulation, and opportunities
for public life through their participation in volunteer causes.
	Although a number of scholars have written on the community
aspects of women's philanthropy, the textual and cultural aspects of
commercial cookbooks, and on foodways as an index of social change, few
true analyses of community cookbooks exist.  With car eful, contextualized
reading we can glean from these texts much about how their women compilers
saw themselves and projected their values.  These books provide, as have
diaries, letters, meeting minutes, and church records, an exciting
"challenge to [the] traditional sources" previously used by historians and
students of culture (Lerner 172).
	Up until a few years ago, on my own kitchen shelves, a group of
twelve or so community cookbooks occupied a not-particularly-honored
niche.  Today that collection has grown abundantly, and in libraries and
friends' collections, I have studied hundreds of these books; without such
a comprehensive familiarity it is difficult to understand which aspects of
a given book are conventional and which ones are innovative; which recipes
common for a particular era and which ones unusual; which phrases echoes
of (o r tributes to) other texts and which ones unique articulations. 
	Among those original twelve community cookbooks I owned for years
was a Jewish community cookbook inherited from my grandmother.  Our
Sisters' Recipes was in bad shape, the cover falling off and the pages,
sewn together by men and machines at the Henders on Press in Pittsburgh in
1909, coming undone.  In this essay, I will explore that cookbook in
detail, reading it as both a constructed literary text and a cultural
artifact, in the spirit and tradition developed by feminist scholars over
the past few dec ades, a tradition of discovering and recovering
previously unknown, unvalued, or undervalued texts. By discussing this
one text deeply, I hope to demonstrate that, like many other print and
non-print texts, from poems to quilts, from novels to samplers, from
letters to gardens, community cookbooks do more than simply "reflect" the
society in which they were published.  These books demonstrate the
participation of the women who wrote them in the creation of that society. 
Simultaneously, I hope to inspir e my readers to re-evaluate the old
community cookbooks on their own shelves--reading them in new ways,
contextualizing them, hearing the stories they contain, fragmentary as
those stories may be. 
	The title page of my 1909 Jewish community cookbook declares this
book to be Our Sisters' Recipes.  Words printed inside a drawing of a
rolling pin at the bottom of this page state that these recipes were
"contributed by many kind hearts and in a worthy cause."  The following
page informs the reader that the book was copyrighted in 1909 by Nettie
Kaufman; presumably Nettie, my great-grandmother, was the compiler of the
recipes, but nowhere does the book credit that activity.  Next we have the
frontispiec e: a brown-toned drawing by my grandmother, Helen Kaufman
Lieberman (Nettie's daughter), of an African American woman, head cloth in
place, full apron surrounding her ample hips, body slightly turned to the
side but face forward, smiling at the viewer, on e hand on her hip, the
other holding a large spoon from which she's about to taste something. 
The table of contents follows this illustration, with no other prefatory
or introductory material. 
	With just this picture and the first few pages, questions
immediately crop up:  Why is the African American cook given such
prominence in a Jewish book?  Why aren't any details given about the cause
the book supports?  Who are the "Sisters"?  A glance th rough the book
shows that the women who contributed recipes were German-Jewish-Americans,
with names like Lazarus, Rothstein, Cohn, and Schwarz.  While my
grandmother contributed illustrations and recipes to the book, as did a
number of her relatives, mak ing her one of "our sisters," I know from
childhood conversations with her and from watching family interactions
that she, for one, never considered any of her in-laws or female relatives
close enough to be "sisters"; she spent very little time communicat ing
memories of past Pittsburgh neighbors and friends; and she and her own
sister barely tolerated each other.
	Perhaps the word sisters quietly references the various Temple
Sisterhoods in which many of the women invested their philanthropic
energies.  But the other question remains: who is the African-American
welcoming readers into the kitchen?  How does she fi t into the
"sisterhood"?  And also, what is the "worthy cause" and why isn't it
spelled out more clearly? 
	 Like earlier fund-raising cookbooks, Our Sisters' Recipes was
published to raise money; in this case profits supported an unnamed
Pittsburgh synagogue's social service programs. Although my grandmother
herself, at the time when I was a young child and until her death in 1969,
was not involved in religious observance, her parents and other family
members (perhaps she too as a youngster) had been congregants at Temple
Rodef Shalom; her grandfather had helped found this reform temple where
Dr. J. Leonard Levy not only conducted services but ran an active
community center.  My grandmother's sister, my great-aunt Ruth, was still
alive when I began exploring Our Sisters' Recipes; she told me that the
Temple did support a program for unwed mothers and girls going on to
higher education.  (While Ruth, who was thirteen when the cookbook was
published, did not participate in that charitable project, she provided me
with considerable background information about the values, activities, and
relationships of women in the community she and my grandmother shared.) 
Jacob Marcus explains that from the early nineteenth century on, Jewish
women were active in working for "organized social welfare" (47) within
religious "sisterhoods" or outside them.  Those working in t he
"sisterhoods" were "to a substantial degree . . . the money-raising arm of
the synagogue.  They held fairs, whist parties, rummage sales; they
published cookbooks which brought in thousands of dollars" (80). 
	Since women worked together in these fund-raising efforts, it
seems logical to assume their philanthropic projects grew out of
satisfying religious, ethnic, and neighborhood relationships or
communities.  While this may sometimes have been the case, I su spect that
often other dynamics also affected their charitable work.  Thus, although
some fund-raising cookbooks may evolve from the work of ongoing
sisterhoods or women's communities, others have only a titular basis in
sisterly associations. 
	And that smiling African American cook?  I don't know if she was
my grandmother's or great-grandmother's idea or was suggested by some
other contributor.  No record remains to tell why this particular image
was selected.  In my own speculative reading, b ased on the book's
socio-economic context, as I will discuss later, she becomes a marker of
class . . . but initially she creates a stereotyped welcome into the world
of food. 
	Like its frontispiece, Our Sisters' Recipes exhibits a smiling,
nonassertive, rather reticent (collective) persona.  But is the projected
community, presented for the buyer's consumption along with recipes for
fruit soup, marrow balls, veal croquettes, clam farci, Waldorf salad, and
almond cake, really so quiet, self-assured, innocent?  I don't think so. 
Behind the smiling face of the book, I read tensions and anxieties about
the authors' middle class American status.  The subtext of this 1909
recipe c ollection emerges from the selection and arrangement of recipes
and foodstuffs, the vocabulary and tone of the recipes' language, the use
of terms without explanation or definition, the decorative graphics, and
the way recipe contributors are acknowledged .  Even the advertisements at
the back of the book participate in the textual projection of a special
kind of middle class community.  I am using the term middle class somewhat
loosely, but am aware, partly through Stuart M. Blumin's questioning of
the te rm, that it embraces more than economic condition.  As Blumin
points out, not only unequal income determines class, but also "unequal
distribution of . . . opportunity, workplace tasks and authority,
political power, legal status and social prestige" (2-3 ). 
	Along with the text itself, one must "read" its context--a
community cook book is a subtle gap-ridden kind of artifact, that asks its
reader (at least the reader who seeks more than recipes) to fill those
gaps with social and culinary history, knowledge of other texts (such as
commercial cookbooks), and even personal knowledge.  In 1909, when Our
Sisters' Recipes was published, my great-aunt Ruth although just a
teenager was well acquainted with her female relatives, women of
German-Jewish descent, most of whose ancestors had come to this country in
the middle of the nineteenth-century, and most of whose ancestors had
participated vigorously in the founding of Reform Synagogues.  My
great-aunt's relatives had always been proud of their ability to assimil
ate into American life: they all learned English quickly and well, the men
established businesses, and while never deserting their pasts completely,
they became quite well assimilated into the mainstream culture of New
York, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Atl anta.  They dropped regular
attendance at Synagogue, spoke no Hebrew or Yiddish, abandoned Jewish
dietary regulations and, often, even consumption of traditional Jewish
dishes.  They preferred American commingling to Zionism of any form. Most
of them pr ospered.  While the women of her mother's generation seldom
worked outside the home, Ruth recalled that almost all those women were
able to employ a cook, and sometimes other household help as well. 
	When I suggested that maybe a more truthful title for the
fund-raising book would have been "Our Sisters' Cooks' Recipes," Ruth
laughingly agreed.  For the northern branch of the family, the cooks were
newer Jewish immigrants; for the large southern bran ch the cooks were
African Americans.  With this background information, the frontispiece
suddenly makes sense; the Black cook my grandmother depicted, soup spoon
in hand, head cloth, apron, and smile in place, demonstrates to readers
that "Our Sisters" ha ve achieved enough status to have servants, to
dominate others rather than be dominated by others.  Given that only seven
percent of households employed servants at this time (Margolis 135), it is
likely that some of the cookbook contributors did not actu ally employ
cooks.  However, subtextually the community of authors are all given the
status accruing to those who employ servants.  Cooks who worked for "our
sisters" probably created or contributed some of the recipes, but their
names are not on the reci pes and so, marginalized, they are present in
the sisterhood's community only as markers of the Jewish women's upper
middle class position. 
	The servant has no name or signature; those who "count" in the
sisterhood are known by some print sign.  Most commonly names "own" each
recipe:  Mrs. Jacob Adolph, Mrs. W. B. Klee, Mrs. M.D. Kaufmann, Estelle
Perley, Daisy H. Levy.  At times the sign of ownership diminishes to
simple initials, such as C.S.F. or Mrs. R.R.  Occasionally, individuals
attach their city to their name, or substitute place names for their own
names.  (The geographic markers add another dimension, as these German
Jewish women cl aim American places of origin.)  These signs of the
individual contributors establish that particular recipes are assets,
donated with some degree of ego attachment by the property owners.  The
cookbook's authors are textually substantiated as property ow ners (a role
normally played by their husbands).  In contrast, the frontispiece African
American owns none of the donated material.  Indeed, my grandmother's
initials within the upper right-hand corner of the illustration take a
certain kind of ownership over the person depicted.  The capacity to
employ a cook, demonstrating that one does not perform manual labor
oneself, and designating a certain level of income, becomes part of the
qualification for membership in the middle class community of Our Sister
s' Recipes.
	We can learn more about the community created in this cookbook by
looking at the recipes themselves.  From the kinds of food present and
absent one can conclude that this community excludes those who keep kosher
or observe other religious rituals.  In th is sense, the book is typical
of many fund-raisers published by German Jewish women from the 1870s on. 
As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett points out, "it is characteristic of
Reform Judaism of the period to define itself through a rejection of
Jewish cerem onialism coupled with a commitment to philanthropy, a
combination that reaches an apotheosis of sorts in the treyf [unkosher]
charity cookbook" ("Recipes" 8).  A surprising number of the dishes in
this collection use seafood or pork, or combine milk and m eat.  Thus we
find "Crab a la Creole" (18), two recipes for "Lobster Cutlets" (23), a
"Veal Entree" combining veal, bread crumbs, butter, eggs, milk, salt and
pepper (34).  My grandmother contributed her (or her cook's) version of
"Pigs in Blankets," whi ch calls for oysters and bacon in one recipe
(210). So, we are to presume that those who are Orthodox Jews and those
who observe the religion's traditional dietary laws, are not within this
sisterhood. 
	Then too, the community projected by this cookbook excludes those
who celebrate Jewish holidays with special foods and food observances.
Other Jewish community cookbooks from this era and earlier often included
some mention of dishes traditionally eaten at Passover, for example
special pastries or matzoh dishes. For example, a book published at nearly
the same time as Our Sisters' Recipes, The Council Cook Book (produced in
1908-1909) by the San Francisco section of the Council of Jewish Women,
includes such a section.  
	Also excluded from the community of "Our Sisters" are those who
enjoy (or admit they enjoy?) the traditional Jewish foods prepared by Jews
of Eastern European heritage.  Searching the pages for such Jewish dishes,
one discovers that the German-Jewish "si sters" have included no such
recipes.  Actually, were it not for the women's names attached to each
recipe, one would be hard pressed to guess this cookbook was put together
by American Jewish women.  The only ethnicity to emerge strongly comes
from the G erman origin of most of the contributors.  For instance, in
"Cakes Large and Small" the national background of the book's community
emerges through names like Braehme Apple Cake, Brod Torte, Dobach Torte,
and Vanilla Kipfel.  The "Bread" category include s no recipes for rye
bread or challah (although under cake there is a Rye Bread Torte, so rye
bread does sneak into the house somehow).  Under "Soups and Garnishings"
none of the soups we think of as typically "Jewish" appear: no traditional
chicken soup, no mushroom and barley, no matzoh ball soup.  
	The community presented within this book is one seemingly at home
with America's already established food traditions.  The sisterhood's
collection includes popular dishes of British origin such as English
Beefsteak Pie, Mutton Pasties, and English Wine P udding.  Foods
indicating a French influence, such as Boeuf à la Mode, Rechauffe of Duck,
and Soufflé of Ham show that the women of this cookbook are up-to-date in
food fashions.  As stated before, dishes originating in the German
culinary tradition form a fairly large component of the book.  American
Southern foodways are heavily sampled, including Southern Chili Sauce,
Corn Bread and Corn Pone, Southern Sweet Potatoes, Chicken Gumbo. One
Chinese recipe (Chop Suey) and two Italian (Italian Rice and Biscu it
Tortoni) barely admit the presence of these cultures, but they contribute
to the overall variety of dishes and help to demonstrate the eclectic and
integrated collective pallet of this cookbook community. 
	The selection of recipes also reflects some degree of regionalism. 
The relatives and friends who contributed recipes lived primarily in the
region bounded by Detroit in the north, New Orleans in the south, Chicago
in the west, and New York City in the e ast; most were city-dwellers.  The
frequent appearance of southern dishes reveals the locations and
integration into those locales of a large number of the books'
contributors, while the varied ethnic origin of other recipes seems
indicative of the cultur al diversity found in such cities as Chicago, New
York, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh.  However, without any prefatory or
introductory material stressing regionalism, it is hard to make any strong
assertions about the women's relationship to place.  In my own reading,
the occasional indication of a donor's location, combined with the range
of regionalism or diversity in the recipes, becomes less an assertion of
pride in a particular area of the United States or a specific regional
heritage than a celebration of assimilation into diverse American
locations.  Most of the recipes found in Our Sisters' Recipes, excepting
the concentration of German dishes, could be found in other commercial or
community cookbooks of the period.  These women are second and third g
eneration residents in the United States; they claim American not European
locations as their own.
	In spite of their overall social achievements, the women's
Jewishness would have restricted them (along with their male relatives) 
from numbers of schools, colleges, clubs, resorts, and residential
neighborhoods (Highham 284-87).  Investigating the selec tion of recipes,
the way their contributors are acknowledged, and the frontispiece, we can
already see that the women who created Our Sisters' Recipes were defending
their provisional acceptance within a Christian society by forging for
themselves a solid "establishment" self image.  They construct themselves
as property owners, managers of manual workers, assimilated members of an
emerging urban upper middle class. 
	In its selection of recipes and format, this book firmly separates
itself from community cookbooks in which text as well as sales profits
were directed towards assisting newly-arrived Jewish immigrants.  By
extension, the book separates itself also from those immigrants
themselves.  Cookbooks such as the well known Settlement Cook Book,
published in Milwaukee in 1901, raised money for the settlement houses and
other charities that served newly arriving Jewish immigrants, particularly
those from Eastern E urope, who came into the United States in large
numbers, starting in the 1880s.  The Milwaukee Jewish Settlement House,
founded in 1890, provided cooking classes, among other instructions for
newcomers.  Its famous charitable cookbook, subtitled The Way t o a Man's
Heart, went through over forty editions and raised substantial amounts of
money for this community center.  Strictly speaking its authorship was not
a "community" since only two women put together the whole book.  The two
authors, public figures whose status was defined by their employment at
the Settlement House, engaged in their own kind of complex textual
self-imaging.  While certainly presenting a text that would be acceptable
to the already existing self-image of those who bought the book o ut of a
desire to support the Jewish settlement house in Milwaukee, they were also
trying to encourage some of their readers--newer immigrants who would use
the cookbook to guide their cooking and domestic life in their new
country--to create new self-ima ges, as those readers learned to use
American foods and American cooking techniques.  Marcus explains that
"because most of the Settlement's clients were Orthodox and the
institution itself was Jewishly sponsored, no pork recipes were found in
the origina l edition."  However, even this cookbook contained a few items
outside Jewish dietary laws; Marcus believes that the authors were unable
to resist displaying their own food tastes and sophistication (100). 
	It seems clear that the compilers of Our Sisters' Recipes had in
mind a different audience than did those who put together the Milwaukee
book.  The former collection was being sold to the Pittsburgh community at
large, with profits designated for an unsp ecified cause.  "Our Sisters"
mask or downplay their affiliation with the Jewish community; the authors
of The Settlement Cook Book do not.  The two books, in addition, create
different kinds of relationships between the community of compilers and
the com munity of readers.  The Settlement House authors, although members
of the established German Jewish community, invite their readers to join
them as middle and upper middle class Jews in America, instructing the
community of readers in what are assumed to be the "right" ways to manage
a kitchen, bake a cake, serve a dinner.  The authors of Our Sisters'
Recipes are not inviting those different from them to join their
community; rather, their book provides recipes for those who were already
like them--who ar e assimilated, upper middle class (or middle class
aspiring to "upper" status) German-American Jews of either Reform or
nonobservant religious practice. 
	By the turn of the century, in spite of difficulties they may have
suffered, many German Jews had established themselves quite comfortably in
the United States.  Prejudice against them existed in many forms, so that,
for instance, many women's [and men's ] organizations and institutions
banned membership to Jewish individuals (Marcus 95).  Because of their
recent and sometimes tenuous achievement of assimilation, many German Jews
perceived massive immigration of Eastern European Jews as a threat to the
st atus quo.  Certain group differences exacerbated this tension.  Marcus
explains that there were also major differences in the two groups'
loyalties and values: Central European Jews saw their Eastern European
co-religionists as "uncouth, rejected them bec ause they were 'orientals,'
avoided them because they were Orthodox, detested them because they were
Zionists, and held them responsible for the anti-Semitism of the late
nineteenth century" (105).  In turn, the East European Jews found the
German Jews "p atronizing" (106) and of course rejected their more
easy-going religious habits. 
	 I believe that Our Sisters' Recipes bears mute witness to my
ancestress' insecurities about maintaining their hard won middle class
Americanized status as increasing immigrant populations threatened their
assimilation and acceptance into mainstream soci ety.  Many Jewish women
of Central European ancestry overcame their own prejudice, actively
attempting to help the newer East European immigrants prosper.  The
establishment of settlement houses and books like The Way to a Man's Heart
demonstrate that pro clivity.  Other German Jews felt their own
assimilation threatened.  Outnumbered by the new arrivals (Marcus reports
that by 1890 "Russian" Jews outnumbered "German" Jews strongly [105]),
some Jewish individuals defended their hard-won integration into so ciety
by disclaiming relationship to the new arrivals and by downplaying their
own ethnic and religious backgrounds.  The high point of immigration by
eastern European Jews occurred between 1900 and 1910:  1,051,788 Russian
Jews entered America in that de cade (Baum 35). 
	From the language and format of Our Sisters' Recipes one can see
that the collective authors are not offering instructions to the
uninitiated.  They evidently projected an audience of women very like
themselves, familiar with the same cooking techniques, food items, and
food habits.  (Regardless of what the communal authors assumed, it's
possible, even likely, that some who bought the book were quite unlike the
compilers, but bought the book to learn the compilers' foodways.)  No
ingredients are so stran ge as to require explanation.  And so far as I
can see, only one food item, "Chinese brown 'se yu' sauce" is placed in
quotation marks, indicating its exotic nature.  As is common for the era
of this publication, oven temperatures are significant by thei r absence,
although in some cases a "slow" or "rather quick" oven is recommended. 
Measurements frequently lack scientific precision, so that a "generous
slice of roquefort" or an unspecified amount of "spinach" or even just
"meat" can be a listed ingredi ent.  In the last case, the text of the
recipe, one for barley and prunes, does narrow things down a little. 
"Place a small piece of fat brisket with sufficient water to cover, and
boil" it begins.  Our Sisters' shared assumptions about ingredients and c
ooking techniques are very different from the assumptions behind the
Milwaukee "Settlement" Cookbook.  The first chapter of the latter offers
information on "Relative Value of Foods," rules for table setting and
serving of food, dish washing procedures, a nd even suggestions on how to
build a fire and dust a room.  General preparation guidelines precede the
recipes within each chapter devoted to a particular category of food. 
Recipes are quite precise throughout. Clearly this book is attempting to
inclu de within its sisterhood those who are not already within the fold
of the assimilated community.
	Now, Our Sisters' Recipes does include some advice, but that
advice is rarely instructional.  Usually it is in the mode of gratuitous,
self-congratulatory comment.  The barley and prune recipe I mentioned
above, for instance, includes the opinion that "t his dish makes a nice
accompaniment to a pot roast" (50).  Another, for a "fruit appetizer"
explains that the arrangement of pineapple, grapefruit, orange and
maraschino cherry "can be beautified by sprays of maidenhair fern" (2).  A
biscuit recipe boasts : "You will find these biscuits far superior to
those made with prepared flour, etc.  In fact, this recipe, closely
followed, makes the very finest, most healthful biscuits macabre" (178). 
However, this kind of discussion is more the exception than the r ule. 
	The overall tone of this book's recipes is not chatty, tending,
rather, to be rather aloof and peremptory.  Is the tacit message: "We're
sisters; we don't need to chat about this food.  Here's the recipe if you
want it"?  My colleague Marcia Dickson remi nds me that many sisters,
rather than being so businesslike, do chat about recipes, so that the lack
of textual conviviality here would appear to indicate a lack of real
sisterhood.  Yes.  The subtext seems to be that the sisterhood shared by
these women is not so much a biological or familial or spiritual
connection but a collective achievement of upper middle class assimilated
American standing. 
	The recipes in this book, with some variation, are arranged in a
pattern typical for such texts; but it's worth noting that this
arrangement is still a choice.  The first few chapters especially are
ordered to follow the plan of a full-course dinner: fi rst come appetizers
and then soups, on to fish and sea foods, meats, poultry, vegetables, and
salads, and thence to different kinds of desserts.  The unstated
assumption is that in this sisterhood people do have elaborate
multi-course dinners.  Bread foll ows desserts, perhaps because it is a
low status, all purpose food.  As is the case in many cookbooks
(commercial as well as fund-raising), order becomes somewhat random
towards the end of the book as we zigzag through pickles and preserves, to
beverages, to "supper dishes," and end with candy. 
	Each category opens with a decorated heading, the art having been
provided, as was the frontispiece, by my grandmother.  Her son and sister
attested to her artistic "professionalism," but the lettering and designs
show us a young artist experimenting wit h styles.  This eclecticism
connects for me with the contributors' own pride in their participation in
an eclectic culture; these designs, like the actual recipes, do not
reflect a particular ethnicity or devotion to one decorative motif.
"Appetizers" is distinctly art nouveau in its lettering and surrounding
border.  The "Fish and Sea Foods" lettering are aswirl with flowing lines;
two fish, distinctly oriental in tone, twining through the inked water. 
"Meats" delicately avoids the carnal, with a desi gn of flowers and vines. 
"Vegetables" is bordered by a folksy, plump eggplant and perky turnip. 
The "homiest" heading illustration features a white woman with rolled up
sleeves working at a kneading trough beside the rather boldly lettered
word "Breads ." 
	As is typical of fund-raising cookbooks, a section at the back of
the book is devoted to advertisements of varying size and elaborateness.
While a number of the advertised businesses bear Jewish names, other names
indicate Irish, German, or British bac kgrounds for the business owners. 
Ladies' hair dressers and tailors, home furnishing establishments, food
purveyors, photographers, clothing stores, hotels, and eateries are the
dominant advertisers.  At a practical level, of course, sale of these ads
co vered publication costs.  But in my reading of the text, they have two
other functions as well.  First, they provide yet another index of the
sisters' integration into society:  their business is welcomed by
merchants of all nationalities.  Second, and ju st as important, perhaps,
the ads attest to the women's elevated status as consumers.  In the early
part of the twentieth century these women were still deprived of full
political and property rights, yet held considerable power to determine
what succeede d on the market and what failed.  The ads confirm that
power.  Women's emergence into the workforce may be reflected also,
although only directly in one ad for business courses at Duffs College. 
Since nonmanual work did not exclude one from middle class status the way
manual labor would have, the idea of women going to work outside the home
is kept from being a threat to the status quo.  If "Our Sisters" do turn
to work outside the home, they will not have to lose their toehold in the
middle class. 
	In Writing a Woman's Life Carolyn Heilbrun lists four ways in
which women "write" their lives: "the woman herself may tell it, in what
she chooses to call an autobiography; she may tell it in what she chooses
to call fiction; a biographer, woman or man, may write the woman's life in
what is called a biography; or the woman may write her own lif e in
advance of living it, unconsciously, and without recognizing or naming the
process" (13).  Heilbrun embraces letters and diaries as part of
autobiography, but she does not include the many non-literary texts that
women have created.  Deprived of a p ublic voice for various reasons,
women have often been limited to expressing themselves via what I will
call domestic media.  Thus, patchwork quilts can be "read" as part of
women's autobiography, often a collaborative or group expression of a
community's common assumptions or assertions.  In the same way, I believe
we can read community cookbooks to ascertain important social attitudes,
desires, biases, and cultural habits of groups of women.
	It is impossible for me to know what "our sisters" would have said
their purposes were in putting together Our Sisters' Recipes, other than
raising money for the Temple's good works program.  In my own reading of
their textbook, I find that at some level they were also claiming for
themselves the right to embrace and transmit aspects of their value
system--to write themselves we could say.  This act of self-definition
--non-didactic, non-polemical, probably unarticulated by any one
participant--demonstrates that although mostly limited to the private
sphere, these middle class Jewish women were active in the construction of
a community.  The text they produced does not readily admit the true
nature of that community.  It struggles to present a communal self-image
of well-to-do American women, secure in their various urban locations,
generously contributing recipes for a good cause. However, examination of
the text's many elements reveals that the authors' most urgent communal
work is creating a written d efense of the social and economic successes
they have achieved. 

			End Notes

	 America's Charitable Cooks: A Bibliography, catalogs
fund-raising cook books published in the United States from 1861-1915.
While it is not complete (how could it be?), it does provide the
researcher a place to start.  Few other bibliographies exclusively list
fund-raising cookbooks.  An exception is Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's
listing, "Jewish Charity Cookbooks in the United States and Canada: A
Bibliography of 201 Recent Publications," which includes books from about
1975.  Discovering community cookbooks is often a process of searching
individual libraries, historical societies' archives, bookshops, and
private collections. 
	 For useful discussions of women's volunteer work, see Lady
Bountiful Revisted, edited by Kathleen McCarthy; I found especially
helpful the essays by Anne Firor Scott and Nancy Hewitt (respectively,
"Women's Voluntary Associations: From Charity to Refor m." and "Charity or
Mutual Aid: Two Perspectives on Latin Women's Philantrhopy in Tampa,
Florida") as they opened my eyes to the complexities of motives for such
activities.  Estelle Freedman's "Separatism as Strategy: Female
Institution Building and Amer ican Feminism, 1870-1930" also speaks to the
tensions at work within philanthropy. 
	 Lynne Ireland's 1981 "The Compiled Cookbook as Foodways
Autobiography" and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's more recent work with Jewish
fund-raising cookbooks (in, for example "Recipes for Creating Community"
and "Kitchen Judaism" are exceptions to my general statement. 
    	 That such scholarship is now recognized and supported by academic,
government, and private organizations is most encouraging.  The generous
support of the Ohio State University's Center for Women's Studies and an
OSU Seed Grant, along with a grant from Radcliffe College, have made my
own research into community cookbooks possible. 
		 Having personal or family connections to a particular 
community cookbook makes it easier to "read" although such a
connection is by no means required.  In a book I recently edited, 
Recipes for Reading, contributed articles demonstrate many ways 
of contextualizing fund-raising cookbooks, through a variety of 
research techniques.
	 Since the book includes twenty-two pages of advertisements for
businesses in Pittsburgh, one must assume it was to be sold in that city,
to benefit an organization there.  The book contains no introduction
explaining what programs its profits would sup port. 
	 Blumin points out that ethnic loyalty is often expressed through
"particular symbols, rituals, myths, and other traditions, including some
that are reflected in such everyday matters as dress and cuisine" (250). 
In their urgent effort to become assimi lated as middle class Americans,
my ancestors rejected many of these ties to their heritage. 
	 As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explains, books such as the one I'm
discussing were often "selectively treyf--they may include shrimp,
oysters, ham, and bacon, but less often lard and pork" ("Recipes" 8).  No
recipe in Our Sisters' Recipes calls for uncured p ork or lard. 
	 It is commonly accepted that Fannie Farmer's 1896 Boston
Cooking-School Cook Book was the first cook book to introduce precise
measurements to cooking texts.  No doubt its form (and goals) strongly
influenced the authors of the "Settlement" cook book. Farmer's book opens
with a chapter on the composition of various foods;  the subsequent
chapter includes fire building, methods of preparing and cooking food,
measurements, and time tables.  Each food category chapter includes some
general information pre ceding the specific recipes.
	 The Milwaukee "Settlement" cook book has sections of Milwaukee
business advertisements at both the beginning and end of the book, and the
Boston Cooking-School Cook Book has a section of ads for food products and
cooking equipment at the back of the v olume.  While not all fund-raising
cookery texts defray printing costs with ads, the practice is extremely
common. 
	 See Blumin for discussion of antebellum establishment of the
dichotomy between manual and nonmanual workers (127-33). 




			Works Cited
Baum, Charlotte.  "What Made Yetta Work: The Economic Role of Eastern European Jewish Women in the Family."  Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review 18 (Summer 1973): 32-38.
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Bower, Anne L. Ed.  Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories.  Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1997.
Cook, Margaret.  America's Charitable Cooks: A Bibliography 	of Fund-Raising Cook Books Published in the United 	States (1861-1915).  Kent, Ohio: 1971.
Farmer, Fannie Merritt.  The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. 1896.  New York: Weathervane, [1974].
Freedman, Estelle.  "Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870-1930."  Feminist Studies 5 (Fall 1979): 512-29.
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Lerner, Gerda.  The Majority Finds Its Past:  Placing Women in History.  N.Y.: Oxford UP, 1979.
Marcus, Jacob R.  The American Jewish Woman, 1654-1980.  New York: KATV Publishing House, 1981.
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McCarthy, Kathleen D.  Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, 	Philanthropy, and Power.  Ed. Kathleen D. McCarthy.  New 	Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers, 1990. 
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